I recently purchased a copy of Castlevania Aria of Sorrow for the Game Boy Advance from a seller on eBay. Given that copies of this game (with or without the box) tend to sell for $100 or more, I was happy to find a seller with good reviews listing the cartridge for $20. I had heard of counterfeit copies of this game going around, but figured I’d take my chances. They can’ be that common, right?

The cartridge I received does in fact contain a working copy of the game, and it even saves! What’s not to like? That said, my first clue that something was off came when I put the cartridge in the GBA… you can see that it doesn’t quite fit snugly in the slot, the way a genuine cartridge does.

Fake cartridge doesn’t fit all the way in.

Incidentally, I also purchased a copy of Castlevania Circle of the Moon which turned out to be genuine (it’s also much less popular). Opening the shells and comparing these side to side is revealing:

One of these cartridges is not like the other.

The cartridge on the left is the fake, if the laughable “Nihtehdo” silkscreen didn’t give it away. The chip on the PCB is a modern 4 MB flash chip, still in production. I found the datasheet and you can download it here. The chip under the epoxy blob must be some simple flash controller, custom made for faking GBA cartridges since the save functionality does work reliably.

Some external clues indicating it’s fake are the deeper relief of the “Game Boy Advance” on the cartridge, as well as the poor quality label printing. The ESRB “content rated by” text is barely legible, and on the right side it says “Official Nintendo Seal” instead of “Official Nintendo Seal of Quality” as on the legitimate cartridge.

I’m curious how long this fake will last, because flash memory isn’t known for extreme longevity and I would be very surprised if the flash controller implements any kind of wear-leveling for the save functionality. That said, the flash chip datasheet indicates endurance of 100,000 program/erase cycles per block, so maybe this is not something to worry about. I’ll update this post in the future if the cartridge data or saves start to become corrupted.

All things considered, $20 for a working copy of this game is a steal (pun intended) but your mileage may vary. It goes to show that demand for these old games is still high enough to justify making a seemingly good quality Game Boy Advance cartridge with modern parts to load pirated games on. I can’t say that all of the fakes are just like this one, but there are plenty of very similar fake listings up every day.